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Friday, 26 October 2012

Quakers, bonnets, war. Delete the bonnet, add a female scientist holding a diamond, and this could be the cover of my new novel. Source: IMDB.com

Earlier this year, I met the writer and blogger Sion Dayson at an
event in Paris and we got chatting about her novel-in-progress, When Things Were Green. She kindly sent
me the manuscript, and what a treat it was! A powerful love story, and a portrait
of a small, segregated Southern town where secret lovers meet by the river and
rumours of an immaculate conception hide a darker truth. It's beautiful,
lyrical and edgy all at once -

Finishing school didn’t prepare Susan for the possibility that her
husband might set his sights on the Negress maid.

You can read all about it here because Sion is the
latest contributor to a Q&A that's been travelling from blog to blog. Each
writer answers questions about her/his novel-in-progress and then tags other writers. Guess who she tagged? Ta-daaa! Me. Thank you, Sion. So I'm going to talk about my new
novel, the one I handed in last week. I swore to myself I wouldn't think about
it at all this week, but a Q&A is actually a great post-deadline task. It's
kind of therapeutic. I've passed the phases of denial and anger and am now
ready to come to terms with the fact that yes, I have written another novel,
and it's called...

(What is
your working title of your book?)

...Of Love
and Other Wars. What do you think? Is that a good title? I'm in two
minds about it but apparently it's already up on Amazon, so I guess that makes
it definite.

Where did
the idea come from for the book?

A few years ago I went to the funeral of a family
friend. He was a German refugee who arrived in the UK as a boy in the
1930s and became more English than any Englishman. From his perfect English accent to his
tea addiction to his career as a civil servant, he really did Her Majesty
proud. He was also one of the most inspiring people I've ever known: committed
to social justice, passionate about music, fine art and literature. Yet this
model citizen had been a conscientious objector during the Second World War,
while his best friend had chosen to go and fight.

The best friend held a eulogy at the funeral, and I
came away thinking about their different choices. What would it be like to
refuse to fight a war considered right and necessary by everyone else? What
would it be like to live with that decision in Britain, which really treats the
wartime experience and "doing one's bit" in the fight against Fascism
as a sort of unifying founding myth? My search for an answer brought me to the
Quakers with their radical pacifism. At the same time I was living with my
future in-laws, who are Jewish. Gradually, I began to see the story of
Paul, a Quaker boy in London torn between his family's beliefs and his love for Miriam, a
Jewish girl who wants nothing more than to be allowed to fight like a man.

Conchies at Dartmoor Prison during the Great War (source: Dartmoor Prison Museum)

What genre
does your book fall under?

Literary fiction, apparently. The whole idea of
fitting a genre is very silly, isn't it?

What is the one-sentence
synopsis of your book?

See what I did there? I struck out
"one-sentence"! That's the sort of maverick I am. The book is
about Paul, his brother Charlie, and Miriam, and their choices during the
Second World War. It's also about two families: Paul's Quaker clan, and
Miriam's family of diamond-cutters. Each of the characters makes a decision
that feels genuinely right at the time, and yet takes them down a path that's
ever so slightly (or even completely, dramatically) wrong. I find this happens
quite often in life. Tragedy isn't a high and lofty thing, it tends to be an
accumulation of small decisions with major consequences.

Which actors
would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I randomly met a young actor in New York - Xalvador
Tin-Bradbury - who went to a Quaker school in northern England and loathed it.
He would be perfect for Paul, or indeed Charlie. Nathalie Portman for Miriam,
maybe? She'd need to put on some weight though. Miriam is supposed to be
zaftig.

Slowly does it (no snails were harmed in this project*).

Will your
book be self-published or represented by an agency?

It's going to be published by Simon&Schuster UK next
year (unless I have to tackle another major re-write, in which case we're talking
2014...). My agent is Stan at Jenny Brown Associates in Edinburgh.

How long did
it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

A year, because I rushed it. It was awful so I pretty much ditched the entire thing and started again. Hard-won
insight: don't rush it.

What other
books would you compare this story to within your genre?

There's a film called "Friendly
Persuasion" about a U.S. Quaker family during the civil war. Not the same
genre; not even the same medium. But it does feature some lovely scenes that
encapsulate this sense of doing what is so clearly right in the eyes of some,
and so clearly wrong in the eyes of others.

Who or what
inspired you to write this book?

The family friend I mentioned earlier. My
partner's grandmother, and her brave choices during the war, also inspired
me in a wider sense. Her courage
and resilience were very much on my mind when I wrote this book.

What else
about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

It's a love story! In fact, it's four love
stories. Four very different couples, but I've grown enormously fond of all of
them.

Here's one I made earlier.

And
now...drumroll....let me introduce you to three
fabulous writers who've agreed to be tagged for The Next Big Thing:

Melinda Joe is a sake, wine and food writer
in Tokyo who is working on a delicious novel that makes me miss Japan (and Melinda) every
time I read a new chapter. Check out her blog, too. Fermented fish guts, the perfect choice for an elegant aperitif. I did have fish sperm once, but it didn't taste quite as yummy as it sounds.

Karin Spirn is a martial artist, community
college teacher and writer whose brilliant campus novel about post-structural
analysis and hard-working wonderbras has brightened up my week. It also features academia porn. Yes, that's right! Academia porn.

Ceri Radford is a journalist and the author
of the wonderfully funny and clever "A Surrey State of Affairs". We were
trainees at Reuters together, and all those mock press conferences in the
fictional country of Manchukistan clearly did something to our imagination. She
is about to finish her new novel, and I'm so excited about it!

* In case you worry about the snail used as a fridge magnet in the photo: it now lives happily in the hedge outside our house, having been evacuated from my flowerpots.